“Maybe I ought to have killed the whole boiling of them young termagents,” he said. “They’ll grow up and make a heap of trouble for sheepmen, but let ’em be. I ain’t got the heart to make away with a lot of babies like them.”
It was dark when, on topping a backbone of desolate mountain, they saw in a valley below them a light shining amidst the blackness. Jim declared that this must be the ranch for which they were searching, and they made their best speed toward the lonely beacon. If it had been hard traveling by daylight through the forest, it was doubly difficult to make their way by night. But Jim appeared to possess in a superlative degree that wonderful sense of location peculiar to persons who have passed their lives in the great silent places of the earth. It has been noted by travelers that a young Indian boy, who has apparently not noted in the slightest the course followed on a hunting expedition into the great woods, has been able, without any apparent mental effort, to guide back to camp the party of which he formed a member. Such a faculty has been ascribed as more due to instinct, the sense that brings a carrier pigeon home over unknown leagues, than to anything else.
Through the darkness they blundered on, through muskegs, fallen timber and swollen creeks—the latter due to the heavy rains of the afternoon. At length, after it appeared to Ralph almost certain that they must have lost their way, they came out on a plateau and saw shining not half a mile from them the light for which Mountain Jim had been aiming.
A sea captain, with all the resources of highly perfected instruments, could not have made a more successful land-fall. But as they drew nearer to the light, a puzzled expression could have been observed on Mountain Jim’s face had it been clearly visible. Ralph, too, soon became aware of a great noise of shouting and singing proceeding from the vicinity of the light.
“Must have some sort of a party going on,” he observed to his companion.
“I dunno,” was Mountain Jim’s rejoinder. “Donald Campbell used to be a bachelor and no great shakes for company. Maybe he’s married and they’re havin’ a pink tea or something.”
Soon after, they rode up to a rough looking house, behind which, bulking blackly against the darkness, were the outlines of haystacks. Several horses were hitched in front of the place and the door was open, emitting a ruddy stream of light that fell full on one of the animals. Ralph recognized the cayuse with a start. It was one of those that had been ridden by the Bloods. There was no mistaking the animal’s pie-bald coat and wall-eye. He was what is known among cowmen as a “paint-horse.”
Ralph gasped out his information to Mountain Jim. His companion only nodded.
“I’ve been thinking for some time that there is something queer about this place,” he said, “but there’s no help for it, we’ve got to see it through now.”
And then a minute later he made an odd inquiry: